03/06/2016 (Agence Europe) - EU joins Mission Innovation initiative. The European Union has become the 21st member of the Mission Innovation initiative, which was launched as part of the COP 21 climate conference. The initiative seeks to increase public and private funding for research and development in energy transition, to reach an overall annual sum of €26.5 billion by 2021. The announcement was made by the European Commission as part of the first ministerial meeting on this initiative, which took place in San Francisco on 1-2 June. All the members of the initiative are committed to gradually doubling their budgets for clean energies and coordinating their research programmes. For the EU, this means that the budget for clean energies, in the EU's Horizon 2020 framework programme for research and development, will increase from €1 billion (2015) to almost €2 billion in 2020. Among the EU member states joining the initiative are Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the United Kingdom. (JK)